Too Late for Regret, Alpha: The Luna He Divorced

Five years ago, under the Harvest Moon, Ronan Greaves made me his Luna because his dying father ordered it. Tonight, under the same moon, in front of every wolf in Greyford, he unmade me.

The day started with a broken wrist.

“It’s not broken,” Ollie Brandt told me, white to the lips, holding his arm against his chest in the doorway of my office at six in the morning. He was seven. He’d fallen off the hay barn roof, which he’d been told forty times not to climb. “It’s just bent.”

“Let me see the bent part.”

He held it out. It was broken. I could see the angle and I could feel it, the way I’d felt every hurt in Greyford for five years, a hot wire running from his small arm straight into mine. I took his hand very gently, and I took the pain with it. That’s what a Luna does. The Hearth runs through her, and she carries what she can so the pack doesn’t have to.

Ollie’s face went pink again. My own wrist began to throb, slow and deep, as if I’d been the one on the roof.

“Oh,” he said, surprised. “That’s better.”

“Go and find Linnea. Tell her I said it’s a clean break and she’s to set it before breakfast. And Ollie?”

“Yes, Luna?”

“If you go up on that roof again, I’ll tell your uncle Teo, and he’ll make you run the boundary in the rain.”

He went, cradling his arm and grinning. I sat back down at my desk and held my own wrist under the edge of it, where nobody could see, and waited for the ache to settle into something I could work through.

There was always work. The county’s letter about the river lease was on top of the pile, due back in November, and nobody else in Greyford knew the solicitor’s name. Under it, the school roster. Under that, the Lowmere treaty papers for tonight, which I’d drafted, and which Ronan would sign at the high table as though he’d written them himself.

Hettie Briggs came in without knocking, the way she had since I was nineteen, and put a plate of bread and butter on top of the river lease.

“Eat.”

“I’m working.”

“You’re always working. Eat.” She was sixty-one and built like a kitchen door, and there was flour on her apron and in her eyebrows and on the doorframe where she’d touched it. She looked at my hand under the desk. “Ollie?”

“Wrist.”

“You took it?”

“He’s seven.”

Hettie made the sound she made instead of swearing. “And who takes yours, Thea?”

I didn’t answer. She already knew the answer. She’d known it for five years.

“He’s back,” she said instead, more quietly. “The Alpha. Came in at four. Went straight to the guest wing to check on the Lowmere rooms.” She paused. “He didn’t come by here.”

“He hasn’t come by here in nine days,” I said. “I’ve been counting. It’s a habit.”

She opened her mouth and shut it again. Outside, on the long gravel drive, I heard cars. Three of them, big and dark, with Lowmere’s river crest on the doors, coming up between the oaks in the early light. I went to the window. Bertram Lund got out of the first one, huge and cheerful, shaking hands with Callum. A girl got out of the second. She was young, nineteen or twenty, with red hair that caught the sun like a struck match, and she stood very still on the gravel, looking up at the house.

Ronan came down the front steps two at a time.

I watched him cross the drive. I watched his face when he reached her. I’d been married to him for five years and I had never once seen his face do that.

“Eat your bread,” Hettie said behind me, and her voice had gone strange.

“I’m not hungry,” I said. “But thank you.”

The Harvest feast started at moonrise.

Greyford is a river pack, two hundred and twelve wolves in a long green valley, and the Harvest feast is the one night a year every one of them is in the hall at once. The tables run the length of it. The Hearthstone sits in the middle of the floor, old and black and warm, and above it the roof lantern stands open to the sky so the moon can look straight down on us. It was huge tonight, and orange, and close.

I sat at the high table, at Ronan’s left, where I’d sat for five years. Odile sat at his right. She wore her pearls and her silver-blond hair up in the style she’d worn as Luna for twenty-seven years before me, and she hadn’t spoken to me since the soup.

Down the table, the Lowmere guests. Bertram Lund, laughing at something. Beside him, the red-haired girl.

I’d met Callum in the corridor outside the hall an hour before, coming out of the guest wing with his tie crooked and his face doing something complicated.

“Callum. Who’s the girl?”

He stopped. Callum Rafferty had been Ronan’s Beta for five years and his best friend for twenty, and he had never in his life been able to lie to my face. He’d tried once, about a broken window, when we were all children, and burst into tears.

“Bertram’s daughter,” he said. “Hazel.”

“How old?”

“Nineteen.”

“And when did Ronan meet her?”

“At the midsummer treaty meeting. At Lowmere. In June.” He swallowed. “Thea. You should ask him. Not me.”

“I’m asking you because you’ll answer,” I said. “June. Thank you. That’s three months.”

“Thea.”

“Fix your tie,” I said, and went past him into the hall, and I didn’t let myself count anything else until I was sitting down.

Down the table, the red-haired girl hadn’t touched her plate. Neither had I.

The plates went out. The cider came in. Elder Augustin rose and gave the blessing over the harvest, in that warm, slow voice that had taught half the pack their letters, mine included. He caught my eye as he sat down, and smiled at me, and I smiled back, because he was the one person at that table I could always smile at.

Then Ronan stood up.

The hall went quiet the way a hall full of wolves goes quiet, all at once, two hundred heads turning. He was tall and dark-haired, broad in the shoulders, with his father’s green eyes. He’d been Alpha for five years. He’d been handsome all his life and had never once had to think about it.

“Greyford,” he said. “Before the treaty, I have something to say. I’m going to say it the old way, under the moon, so nobody can say it wasn’t done right.”

I knew. I think I’d known for nine days. I put my hands flat on the table so nobody would see them.

He turned to me.

“I, Ronan Greaves, Alpha of Greyford, sever you, Thea, from my Hearth and my house.”

Somebody gasped at the long tables. Somebody else laughed, short and shocked, and was hushed.

“I give cause,” Ronan went on, and his voice was steady, and he looked at a point just above my head. “Five years and no heir. A marriage got from a dying man who didn’t know what he was saying. And a Luna whose wolf can’t keep up with the run.” He drew a breath. “With cause, she takes nothing. That’s the law.”

Odile nodded, once, beside him. The pearls moved on her throat.

“And I’ll say the rest so it’s said.” He turned, and held out his hand down the table, and the red-haired girl stood up very slowly, as if she wasn’t sure her legs would hold her. “Hazel Lund of Lowmere is my fated mate. The Moon gave her to me. I mean to mark her, and I won’t do it while I’m married to someone else.”

The hall made a sound I’d never heard it make. Not a cheer. Not a gasp. Something in between, like a crowd watching a tree come down.

I looked at Hazel. She was looking at me. Her face had gone the color of milk.

Then I looked at Ronan, and waited until he looked back.

“Is that all your causes?” I asked.

He blinked. Whatever he’d prepared for, it wasn’t that. “What?”

“Your causes. You’ve given three. I want to be sure there aren’t any more before I answer, because once I answer, it’s done, and you can’t add any later. That’s the law too.” I kept my hands flat. “I wrote the summary of it for the school. Page four.”

Somebody at the warriors’ table laughed, and stopped.

“That’s all,” Ronan said.

“You’re sure.”

“I’m sure.”

“Then I am severed,” I said.

The Hearth went out of me like a fishhook pulled backward.

I had never felt anything like it. Five years of the whole pack running through my chest, every bruise and burn and broken wrist, every fever, every grief, two hundred and twelve threads all tied to one place under my breastbone, and they came out at once. I didn’t make a sound. I’d decided before he finished the first sentence that I wouldn’t make a sound. But my hands came up off the table on their own and I had to put them back down.

Across the hall, I saw Ollie Brandt, his arm in a fresh white splint, suddenly clutch his wrist and start to cry.

That was the worst of it. Not Ronan. Ollie.

Down the table, Hazel Lund had half risen out of her chair. “I didn’t,” she said, to nobody, to the whole hall, her voice thin and young. “He said it would be private. He said it was a formality, he said it would be done by the lawyers.” Her father put a big hand on her shoulder and sat her down again, gently, the way you’d sit down a child who’d stood up in church, and said something in her ear, and she shut her mouth and stared at the tablecloth.

I believed her. I hated that I believed her.

The musicians didn’t know whether to play. Ronan said, “Play,” and they looked at Odile. Odile lifted one finger, and they played.

I sat there with my hands on the table while the hall broke into noise around me, and I didn’t cry. I had cried about Ronan Greaves for exactly one year, and I’d closed that account.

I sat and waited for the rest of it to go.

Because there was more than the Hearth inside me. There had been for five years. Something heavier, older, set in me at the bottom of a river one August night and never once moved. I’d carried it through him so long I’d forgotten what my body felt like without it. When the Hearth tore out, I thought it would go too. I thought it had to.

I waited, with Ronan’s hand on Hazel’s shoulder and his mother’s pearls catching the moonlight, and his pack staring at me from every table in the hall.

It didn’t go.

The Hearth went out of me and I waited for the rest to go with it. It didn’t. Ronan had taken back his pack. He didn’t know he’d left his father’s in me.

The feast went on, because Odile wouldn’t let it stop.

“Sit down, Hettie,” she said, when Hettie came out of the kitchen with a ladle in her fist and murder in her face. “The guests are still eating.”

“The guests,” Hettie said, “can eat my apron.”

“Hettie.” I caught her arm as she passed the high table. “Don’t. Not for me. You live here.”

“So did you, an hour ago.”

Odile rose, smoothing her skirt, and came around the table to me with a cardboard box in her arms. It was a good box, the kind the county sent files in. She set it down beside my plate.

“Your things,” she said. “From your rooms. The clothes are folded.”

I looked inside. Somebody had packed it carefully, which was worse than if they’d thrown things in. My hairbrush. My mother’s photograph in its cheap frame. My winter boots, the left one on top of the right, the way I never put them. Folded sweaters. A stack of my own handwriting, the school notes, tied with string.

“You pack